The Mysterious Problem
A problem from the shadows
It is not unusual for people to know that something is wrong in their lives, that there is some kind of problem somewhere, but be unsure of much else. The problem seems to live in the shadows and to travel in the smoke of the anxious mayhem it creates or the dampening mist of depression that follows it. Sometimes the problem presents itself as a huge boulder in your path as you simply want to move forward in your life and grow, but are unsure how to proceed and feel discouraged. Let’s take a moment to hear Anna Akhmatova’s description of a haunting presence in her home, living alongside her and her husband, always just out of sight:
It was dreadful to live in that house
… that good fortune
Didn’t dare take a step from our door
For seven years,
Nothing diminished that feeling of fear.
And I learned to laugh at it,
And I left a drop of wine
And crumbs of bread for the one who every night
Scratched like a dog at the door
Or peered through the low-set window,
While we, keeping still, tried
Not to see what was happening behind the mirror,
Under whose heavy tread
The steps of the dark staircase groaned
…
Now that you’re there, where everything is known—tell me:
What else lived in that house besides us?
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Despite so much ostensible good fortune, a mysterious problem was incubating in her life, her home, and relationship. She tried to cope by laughing off her fear of it, but fearful laughter can be like a dimming torch, barely keeping out the things of the dark until it finally fizzles. She tried appeasing the mysterious problem with crumbs from her life but nothing she did diminished the fear of this unseen presence. At the end of the poem, she looks to her now-deceased husband for insight. He is in the afterlife, “where everything is known,” but that also means her question will remain unanswered—the mystery intact.
The power source
The mysterious problem’s power lies in the fact that we do not understand how it is operating or functioning in our life. Like the cockroach or mouse it reigns in the dark parts of our house—in the basement, attic, walls, or whatever rooms we leave the lights off. We tend to be afraid that the problem will get worse when we look at, and this may feel true at first, but if you do look, little by little your fear will become less disproportionate to the threat. The mysterious problem’s psychological threat is very much enhanced when we let it operate in the dark because it is more unpredictable. It feeds on your fear and makes you feel far weaker than you are, like a parasite that simply can’t survive on its own strength. If we are brave enough to shine a light on the problem and look at it directly—to discern its shape, its color, and its tricks—it becomes weaker and more predictable, and we become stronger and empowered to cope with it. To quote Spinoza,
Emotion that is a kind of suffering ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and distinct mental image of it
This is all to say, before we can deal with a mysterious problem, we must be brave and somehow confront the fear of the mysterious problem first (see Terrifying Boredom). And we should not underestimate the kind of psychological torture that the fear alone has inflicted apart from the problem itself. It is common wisdom to recognize that our fear of something may be worse than actually experiencing it, especially since fear is associated with powerlessness in the state of anticipation. Walking through the world with the chronic anticipation of possible threat leads to anxiety disorders, a frayed nervous system, and a susceptibility to panic attacks.
This helpless anticipation is often compounded when we fear something occurring unpredictably, like a loved one who sometimes turns abusive or a work place where you feel no sense of control, let alone mastery over the environment. Any stressor in your life that is unpredictable, extreme, or prolonged can sensitize your nervous system to react with a disproportionate fear response (and then secondarily, irritability/anger). This is a very simple and inclusive way of thinking about trauma. Depressive feelings like chronic fatigue and low motivation can result from being so often overwhelmed by such stressors and coping by avoiding meaningful engagement, either by avoiding situations that might trigger that sensitized stress response or dissociating (checking out in your mind) while you’re in those situations. In my work, I’ve found that people who come in describing problems with depressive or anxious symptoms actually struggle with both depression and anxiety even if one or the other is more pronounced and distressing.
A basic triad
I’ve just described a basic triad that I see a lot in my work: someone comes to me seeking therapy because of depressive and/or anxious symptoms that are distressing or impairing, and when the problem or origin of these symptoms is mysterious, the culprit is usually a trauma in the sense described above. In order to figure out what the trauma is, I help clients engage in an analysis of the symptoms by giving examples of when and under what circumstances they’ve felt these symptoms most and least severely. The details accumulate from which we can identify recurring themes, and I, for my part, am always scanning for points of dissonance such as behaviors at odds with consciously held values, confusing or paradoxical emotions, or beliefs that appear flat-out contradictory. By dissonance, I mean at least two parts of your inner world are out of alignment or, in a more severe case, violently reactive, so that your behaviors, emotions, values, and beliefs may not seem to all belong to the same person.
“The body always tells the truth.”
Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash
One of the easiest places to begin spotting dissonances is the mismatch between dutiful behaviors (“I should”/”I must”) and bodily sensations. For example, you may feel incredibly anxious (“I want to claw out of my skin!”) but you habitually bottle it up and comply with others’ expectations in an effort to please or avoid disappointing. A mentor told me, “the body always tells the truth”—that’s probably why so many of us ignore it and practice tuning out unpleasant sensations. But this is a good place to begin looking for clues about your mysterious problem. Most likely your body was the first to tell you something is wrong in your life, because of the high stress or the low energy, or the tension you hold in various muscles and can’t seem to release, etc. Mindfulness practices that help you feel more grounded and aware in your own body will soothe your distress for a time but won’t be enough to “fix” your problems usually, but they may be a key step toward understanding what your body is trying to communicate to you about the nature of your struggles.
By continuing to trace the dissonances in your inner world, like blood hounds tracking a scent, and recognizing patterns, we are able to pursue the problem to its lair, and when it is properly contextualized, it starts looking a whole lot less mysterious. Oftentimes, at least in keeping with the triad (of trauma, depression, and anxiety), the dissonances of the present (which may include expectations about the future) will lead us to early adverse conditions of life or traumatizing events. When we were kids, we may have internalized from those around us, like our parents (especially under the strain of adverse conditions), a lot of behaviors, emotions, values, and beliefs that are incompatible with one another or incompatible with our current life conditions. And until we developed other more sophisticated ways of reconciling these incompatibilities, our primary method for alleviating internal dissonance was through compartmentalizing the parts of us that didn’t get along—this is a kind of dissociation. Taken to an extreme, we may have split our inner world into separate camps and perhaps even micro-identities in order to keep at least some semblance of peace within. The result is a state of inner fragmentation and disorganization. The very influential psychotherapist Carl Rogers called this state “incongruence,” which can be felt rippling through our relationships as well. Along with Carl Rogers, I view the goals of psychotherapy as helping clients achieve internal and interpersonal “congruence.”
The tragedy of incongruence
A well-integrated, congruent adult with a fully developed brain is capable of incredible resilience, clarity, and adaptive responsiveness in the face of adversity. By contrast, an adult in a state of incongruence will feel completely overwhelmed when confronted with a situation that triggers a trauma state. The problem in the present may seem mysterious because it is the re-experiencing or reliving of a past traumatizing experience in an unfamiliar or difficult to recognize guise. Well, of course we want to minimize the painful dissonances in our life, right? Nope! Not at first, anyway, and not if that means ignoring the underlying trauma. We need change. And recognizing the problem, looking more closely at the evidence of its disruptions in your life, and enhancing the awareness that something really is wrong here will help you take change more seriously by increasing the dissonance. This is of course, very unpleasant, and the reason we might have been distracting from it so long in ways similar to Akhmatova’s trying to laugh off her fear. We must allow our sense of dissatisfaction and internal dissonance to increase in order to motivate us to do something about it.
So how do we regulate the distress of dissonance so that it does not become overwhelming? And how do we heal the trauma at the root of the dissonance we feel? That will be the topic of a future post!
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